the city dwarfed by its own garbage. you have these larger than life surrealistic images which are powerful because they're grafted on to the real world. because they grow out of the real world they gain power. they don't become just whimsical. >> charlie: are you agreeing with that, simon? >> oh, god, life. there's something hall use nation about dickens' prose. sometimes you ask yourself what's this guy on? there's a wonderful passage in the christmas carol where he says of majerle's former house. it was up a yard which it had so little business to be in that you couldn't help fancying that it might have run there as a young house playing hide and seek with other houses. once a writer has written that he's tampering with your brain in a most thrilling way. >> charlie: tell me about his home life and his wife and his wife's sister. >> he was married for 23 years to catherine whose father ran the newspaper the morning chronicle that he wrote for. he lived in that house with catherine and their ten children. she was pregn